It is a copy of a hundred and seventeen buildings, and it never pretended otherwise

The standard verdict on the Poble Espanyol is that it is fake. That is not a review. That is what it is, it is what it was commissioned to be, and it has said so since 1929.

The useful question is a different one, and this page is about answering it: what is it a copy of, who made the copy, and is that worth an afternoon on a hill that also has a fortress and a national museum on it.

What it is

A village, on the flank of Montjuïc, assembled out of reproductions of real buildings from across Spain, built for the 1929 International Exposition.

The operator says 117 architectural recreations at real life scale. The Catalan encyclopedia gives no count at all and gives the area instead: 20,000 square metres. Those are two different institutions measuring two different things, and we are handing you both rather than picking the more impressive one.

It was meant to come down. Its own history is candid: the initial idea was to demolish it when the fair ended, its creators came round to the view that it should endure, and the demolition never happened.

That makes it the exact inverse of the other famous building on that hill. The German pavilion was taken apart in 1930 and rebuilt in 1986; the Poble Espanyol was built to be demolished and never was. Same fair, same eight months, opposite fates — which is the whole story of Montjuïc’s 1929.

The four men, and one correction

Both the encyclopedia and the operator name the same four, which is more agreement than most things on this hill get.

• Francesc Folguera — architect
• Ramon Reventós — architect
• Xavier Nogués — artist
• Miquel Utrillo — the operator describes him as engineer, painter and project leader

You will read that Utrillo was “the critic”. He was an art critic among other things, but that is not how either institution introduces him here, and project leader is the more useful description.

One trap, for anyone who goes to check us: the Catalan encyclopedia has an entry for a Ramon Reventós i Bordoy who was a humorist and writer, born 1880 and died in 1923 — five years before construction began. Different man. There is no encyclopedia biography of the architect. And the encyclopedia itself cannot decide between Raventós and Reventós, spelling it one way in three entries and the other in a fourth.

What it copies, building by building

This is the part nobody publishes and the encyclopedia does. If you go, go with this list:

• The entrance gate — a reproduction of the San Vicente gate of Ávila.
• The town hall — from Vall-de-roures, in the Matarranya.
• The calle de los Arcos — from Seville.
• The fountain — from Prades, in the Baix Camp.
• The church bell tower — from Utebo, in Aragon.
• The monastery, set slightly apart — and this one is important — condenses elements of several Catalan Romanesque churches. It is not a copy of one building. It is a composite, which is a different and more revealing thing.
• The Catalan section — imitations of buildings from Santa Pau, Besalú, Rupit, Camprodon, Isona, Montblanc, Premià de Dalt, la Garriga, Cornudella, Tàrrega and others.

Walking it with those names in hand turns the visit from a stroll through a stage set into something closer to a reading exercise: you are looking at what 1920s Barcelona thought the architecture of Spain was, in the order it thought it mattered.

What we could not verify

How far they travelled. The famous version is that the team drove thousands of kilometres across Spain photographing and measuring. No institution publishes a distance. The operator gives a town count — more than 1,600 villages on one page, 1,600 towns in a Hispano Suiza car on another, which is the same site disagreeing with itself. So: a lot of towns, by the operator’s own account, and no kilometre figure from anybody.

Who owns it. The operator documents only that its management was privatised in 1986 and passed to a group of businessmen in 1996, and that the operating company is Poble Espanyol de Montjuïc, S.A.U. Management is not ownership and we are not going to conflate them.

That it was a Primo de Rivera-era statement about a single unified Spain. This is the standard critical reading and it may well be right. We could not find it stated by an institution or in an academic source we could reach, so it stays out.

The Civil War, which the operator does not hide

Two claims here, and they have different weight.

The operator says the war saw its conversion into a prisoner internment camp. That is on the operator’s own site and it is the only source we have for it — the encyclopedia does not corroborate it. We are giving it to you as theirs.

The operator also says the Franco regime used the museum to disseminate violently anti-Catalanist messages. The encyclopedia corroborates the museum use.

Both are unusual admissions for an attraction to publish about itself, and they are worth knowing before you decide the place is harmless.

Is it worth it

Three honest answers, depending on who is asking.

If you have one or two days in Barcelona: no. Not because it is bad, but because you have not seen the things this city has that nowhere else has, and this is by definition a collection of things that are somewhere else. See two days in Barcelona.

If you have three or more days and you are giving Montjuïc a half day: probably still no, and this is the hard one. A Montjuïc afternoon that does the castle and the quarry behind it is already full, and adding a ticketed village to it means dropping one of those. That is a real trade — see is Montjuïc worth it.

If you are interested in architecture, or you are here with children, or it is raining: yes, and without apology. It is an open-air catalogue of vernacular building types you would otherwise need six weeks and a car to see, made by people who went and looked at the originals. The craft workshops are real work being done in front of you. And the Fran Daurel collection has been there since 2001.

The thing worth carrying in with you

The reason this place is interesting is not that it fools anybody. It never has. It is that it is the most honest object on a hill that is full of reconstructions pretending to be survivals.

Two hundred metres away, a German pavilion that did not exist for fifty-six years is presented as one of the great buildings of the twentieth century, and it is. Down in the old city, a fifteenth-century house that was carried across the neighbourhood is the entrance to the history museum, and a bridge from 1928 is the emblem of the medieval quarter.

The Poble Espanyol is the only one of them that says copy on the door.

Where our walk goes instead

Our Montjuïc walking tour passes it and does not go in, and we will tell you why in one sentence on the way past: two and a half hours is enough for the fairground, the castle and the quarry, and the argument those three make together is the reason the walk exists.

If the village is what you want, do it separately and give it its own slot. It rewards two hours and it punishes twenty minutes, like most of this hill — how to get up here, and what else is on it.

The two buildings from the same fair that people mix up with this one are the German pavilion, which really was demolished, and the Magic Fountain, down the axis towards Plaça d’Espanya.